Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today vowed Israel would never let Iran obtain a nuclear weapon, as world powers sought a deal with Tehran in Geneva over its nuclear drive.
"I pledge Iran will not get a nuclear weapon," Netanyahu, who has never ruled out military action against Tehran, said in a Hebrew-language speech to leaders of Russia's Jewish community in Moscow. He did not elaborate.
Speaking on the second day of a visit to Moscow to campaign against an emerging world power deal with Iran, Netanyahu accused Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of echoing the lexicon of the Nazi Holocaust.
"Yesterday, Iran's supreme leader, Khamenei, said 'death to America, death to Israel', he said that Jews are not human beings."
"Sound familiar?" Netanyahu asked.
"The Iranians deny our past and speak time after time of their commitment to wipe the state of Israel off the map," he added. "That reminds us of the dark regimes which in the past began by persecuting us and later the whole of mankind,"
Khamenei told militia commanders in Tehran yesterday that Israel, Iran's arch-foe, was "doomed to collapse", "the rabid dog" of the Middle East, and had leaders "not worthy" of being called "human".
"That is the real Iran," Netanyahu said. "Such an Iran must not get a nuclear weapon."
After talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, Netanyahu insisted on the need for a "real" solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
Netanyahu's speech in Moscow came as Iran and world powers were set today to begin hammering out a landmark deal freezing parts of Tehran's atomic programme to ease fears of the Islamic republic obtaining nuclear weapons.
Tehran insists that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.
"Iran will continue to harden its positions in the negotiations until the last moment, because it feels that it can," a senior official in the Israeli delegation to Moscow told accompanying journalists today.
"There is a possibility that the interim agreement with Iran will become the final agreement," he said.
"The true face of Iran is the face of the its ruler, Khamenei, who yesterday again attacked the United States while the mob in front of him cried, 'Death to America.
